Here at Cloudera, we know how hard it is to get reliable performance benchmarking results. Benchmarking matters because one of the defining characteristics of Big Data systems is the ability to process large datasets faster. “How large” and “how fast” drive technology choices, purchasing decisions, and cluster operations. Even with the best intentions, performance benchmarking is fraught with pitfalls—easy to get numbers,

One of the key principles behind Apache Hadoop is the idea that moving computation is cheaper than moving data — we prefer to move the computation to the data whenever possible, rather than the other way around. Because of this, the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) typically handles many “local reads” reads where the reader is on the same node as the data:

Initially, local reads in HDFS were handled the same way as remote reads: the client connected to the DataNode via a TCP socket and transferred the data via DataTransferProtocol.

Cloudera’s new Parcels installation format has been released, and I’m excited to highlight just how useful (and mind-blowingly cool) it is to system administrators and anyone responsible for maintaining a CDH cluster.

If you haven’t read about or played with Parcels, they make components of the distribution significantly easier to manage, install, and upgrade. The new Parcel distribution format works with Cloudera Manager 4.5 and later. When you perform installations and upgrades using Parcels,

Start the year off with bigger questions by taking advantage of Cloudera University’s special offer for aspiring Hadoop administrators. All participants who complete a Cloudera Administrator Training for Apache Hadoop public course by the end of March 2013 will receive a free digital copy of Hadoop Operations by Eric Sammer. If you’ve been asked to maintain large and complex Hadoop clusters, this book is a must.